When it came time to make their holiday decisions this past season, online shoppers mostly ignored social channels as purchase influencers, according to survey results from Baynote. Pinterest and Twitter influenced online and in-store purchases for just 1 in 10 shoppers surveyed, with Facebook garnering only slightly more interest. Instead, online ratings and reviews were most likely to influence both online and in-store purchases (33% and 24%, respectively), with Google search results including a pictured product available by the retailer coming in next for online purchases (26%) and paper catalogs (21%) second for in-store purchases. Not surprisingly, social channels were most influential among younger consumers (aged 25-34), while paper catalogs got the attention of the 45+ crowd.
The relatively small influence of social channels overall aligns with data from IBM, which found that on Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day ever, social media sites referred just 0.8% of e-commerce site traffic and accounted for only 0.4% of sales. Meanwhile, the high influence of online ratings mirrors recent research from Weber Shandwick and Ipsos. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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